Its been a while since I did the first phase of the upgrades, which was the HDD. (Samsung HD501LJ)This brought me the opportunity to install vista.

The second phase now comes a month after the first one, which is the coolest of the units that I have ever installed on my PC. Its the nVidia 9600GT (512MB) VGA by Foxconn. It supports PCIex16 and can run most of the games with full specs.

I was waiting for a shop named 'Nunet' to import them, but I got to know through Anusha, that Barclays had the card. So I got the thing from Barclays and bought it home. (that was a long way home for the card, from Unity Plaza to my Office and from there to Malith Aiya's Place and finally home, since we went to see Malith aiya's baby)

Since I forgot to take some decent pictures of the HDD, I decided to take the whole set of pics that would document most of the steps of the installation.

First of all, here goes the packaging:

Decent Look and I like that luminous outer glow. :)

Then after the cover was open, it looked like this. Jumping Jupitor!!! this thing is Huge compared to my old FX5200.!!! Compare the size in pictures below with the CDs.

Here are the stuff that was inside the box;

They include

Driver CD

Another Software CD (which has some disk utilities, not yet tried :D too busy with NFS)

DVI to Analog converter

TV cables (Cant remember what the heck they're called)

Power Adapter

Users (useless) Manual - It contains Chinese in most of it

You might remember from an earlier post that this thing needs 20A in the 12V rail, and I got a new power supply a month or so before. :D

So I checked the space in the casing, alas!! I had to remove the old HDD to install this. The card was so long, it did not have any room in behind. So I relocated the old Maxtor to a CD rack (no screws :S) and installed the VGA.

Notice the small gap between the RAM and the VGA. If I needed to remove the RAM for some reason, I'd have to move the 9600 out first.!!

So I installed the software and rebooted. First things first. Tried to get the resolution right!! No luck. So I went to the next step. Installing NFS MW (The only game I had with me at the time)

It runs with all options and full Anti-Aliasing under 1024x768 resolution at a Frame Rate between 30 and 60. Wow!!! thats cool enough for me.

Did some jugglery to get the resolution fixed again today, got it at last. But the monitor is a pain, the full 1152x864 can be achieved. So I had to put this into an awkward value of 1148x861 through the forceware.

The whole thing got my performance index from 3.3 to 4.8. The lowest is for the processor. The graphics section went from 3.3 to 5.9!!!

Until Anusha brings some games on Monday for me, "I am Rock, there ain't no breakin' me"....